Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Durham, New Hampshire
Thursday, October 10
7:17 p.m.
“I think she’s coming around.” Bright light singed the back of her eyes. A face cleared above her. Perfectly shaped eyebrows, thin lips stretched into a smile, warm eyes. She knew that face. Jenny. Jenny Duval. The medicolegal investigator. “I’m not a medical physician, but I can’t rule out a concussion. Her nose doesn’t appear to be broken. Hard to tell with so much blood.”
Her stomach rolled. Leigh shoved her heels into the floor to turn onto her side, but something—or someone—held her in place. How many head injuries were too many? She was asking for a friend. She brushed her hand to her hip as the last few minutes played out in her mind. Her gun. Where was her gun? “Ow.”
“Welcome back to the land of the living.” Ford’s features took shape behind the flashlight. Pointing to the ceiling, he smiled down at her with a white, watery layer that had to come from losing consciousness too many times.
The brassy taste of blood created a thick layer on her tongue. Silence pressed into her, yet she recognized the two-story open ceiling of Thompson Hall’s lobby. Leigh forced her shoulders off the floor but didn’t get far. “Where is everyone?”
Ford maneuvered around the medicolegal investigator, hands threading under her back to help her sit up. “Secured in classrooms. No more than four in a group. The loudest protestors get to sit with Morrow’s body.”
“Ava.” She scanned the empty lobby.
The marshal steadied her before removing his hold. “She’s fine. She managed to stay away from most of the fighting. She sat by you for a few minutes to make sure you were okay. Then I had her go keep an eye on the others. I’m not going to lie, she was worried about you.”
“I’m sorry. I must’ve hit my head harder than you thought. I think you just said my daughter was worried about me, and that doesn’t sound right.” Maybe she was getting the hang of this motherhood gig. Maybe the fifteen-year-old she’d adopted didn’t hate her as much as she thought. Them being mortal enemies and all. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Ava was okay. She was safe.
“Yeah, well, that one surprised us all,” Ford said. “You must be rubbing off on her.”
Leigh fought against the urge to slump back to the floor. She’d rushed to assist the university president, but she didn’t see him here with them. “What about the staff and administration?”
“Minor cuts and bruising. Seems you took the brunt of the mob’s anger.” Jenny finally got rid of the flashlight, locking those brown eyes on Leigh. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
She shook her head. “You’re not holding any fingers up.”
“Then we’re good.” Jenny slipped her flashlight into her windbreaker pocket. “Now, I can’t tell you what to do and I have the feeling you’d ignore me anyway, but I recommend taking it easy over the next few hours. Just to make sure there isn’t anything I missed.”
Leigh took Ford’s offered hand and got to her feet. Her fingertips brushed the inside of his left wrist, catching on something sticky beneath the cuff. It took her a second to realize it was a Band-Aid. Her head swam as she righted herself—with his help—and she used his chest for balance. “Were you injured in the fight?”
Lifting his forearm, he cracked a smile as he exposed a much larger bandage beneath his suit and shirt sleeve. The sticky substance hadn’t been a Band-Aid but medical tape and a patch of gauze. Stained with a slim line of blood down the middle and hidden by the sleeve of his suit jacket. “Damn kids are faster than I give them credit for. I tried to get to you at the center of the mob. Next thing I know one of them was dragging a pen down my arm. Cut pretty deep, too. Fortunately, it’s not lethal. We can still make our date when we get out of this place.”
Her stomach hollowed. The line of blood seeping through the fabric looked more rust-colored than bright red. Older. Had Jenny patched him up? She tried for a smile, but she was just so damn tired. Her shoulder ached where Dean had slugged her old injury, and she didn’t even want to think about the mess on her face. Leigh stretched her jaw to test for damage. Everything remained in one place. “Can’t wait.”
“You’ll be fine.” Jenny packed her gear in an undersized duffle bag. “Can’t say the same for our dead guy, though.”
“Did you get anything from the remains?” she asked. “Something we can use to identify him?”
“I collected DNA and tried to print both hands. They were swollen beyond belief, but once this storm passes, I can get him back to the morgue to get you an ID if he’s in the system.” The medicolegal investigator unpocketed her phone and swiped to the photos app. “Oh, but I was able to get a couple snapshots of his tattoo. It looks custom, so there’s a chance you might be able to track down the artist. Nice work, too. It would’ve cost an arm and a leg in shading alone.”
“I didn’t see any tattoos on him.” Ford took position over Leigh’s shoulder to get a better view of Jenny’s screen.
“You wouldn’t have unless you were authorized to strip him.” Jenny angled the phone toward them, showing off a rather detailed American flag shaded in black with a strip of blue. “See? I told you it was nice work. Would’ve taken a few sessions to get that detail. Don’t worry. I made sure no one else was in the room when I got the dead guy naked, but I won’t be showing you any of the other photos I took until the autopsy is finalized.”
Tension radiated at her back as Ford straightened. “A flag with a thick blue stripe.”
“He was law enforcement.” This was what they’d been waiting for. Something—anything—to tell them who the unidentified remains were. So why didn’t that critical piece of knowledge make her feel any better? “When will you collect the remains?”
Jenny slipped her phone into her windbreaker and collected her gear. “I’m going back to the office now. I took the liberty of documenting the other two bodies. It’ll probably be a few more hours before I can get the other techs to make the trip out here to get all three of your vics, depending on conditions. The flooding was pretty bad up until a little while ago, but I’d say no more than three hours, four at the most. I’ll let Durham PD know you may need a couple officers to help you with crowd control.”
Probably a good idea. There was no telling how long Ford’s time out would last for the students who’d been ready to escape. Leigh reached out to hold the door open for the medicolegal investigator, but her body thought better of it. “Thanks, Jenny. And thanks for the supplies.”
“Don’t let anyone else die. I don’t have that much room in the van, Agent Brody.” Jenny allowed the door to close behind her with a grin stretched across her face.
If she didn’t feel as though she’d been bulldozed by a snowplow, Leigh might’ve laughed. The medicolegal investigator had the ability to turn any situation into a stand-up comedy routine. Even death. She didn’t realize how much she’d needed that until now. Turning back to Ford, she scanned him from head to toe in case she’d missed any other injuries. Still as handsome as ever. Damn it. “Why do you look like that?”
“Excuse me?” he asked.
She motioned at his chest. And… him in general. “Why do you look like you have your life together when I look like I just left an MMA fighting ring?”
His laugh drove into her, warming the aches and pains throbbing with every pulse. “You’re the one diving headfirst into the action. I don’t want to mess up this face.”
“It’s a pretty face. I’ll give you that.” Leigh tried to rub the soreness from her jaw, but experience told her it would take a few days for the swelling to abate. At least she hadn’t been shot. Or stabbed. Or drowned. Those would be the three items she listed in her gratitude journal tonight. “Jenny took care of assessing Morrow’s body. That leaves us with forensics. Have you heard any updates from the techs?”
“Since you were nearly trampled by a mob of undergrads? No. I haven’t had the chance.” He followed on her heels. Close enough to catch her if she collapsed. “You think they’ll be able to salvage anything?”
“Only one way to find out.” Brushing her hip, Leigh skimmed her fingers over her empty holster. “I take it I have you to thank for confiscating my service weapon from one of those undergrads?”
The riot could’ve gone very bad very fast if Ford hadn’t been there. Hell, how many times had he saved her life now? Twice? More? The details were a little fuzzy now. She was going to owe him more than coffee when this was over.
“Can’t say I can take the credit for that one,” he said.
Wait. What? She pulled up short and cocked her head back to look at him. A flare of unease took over then. “You don’t have my gun?”
The marshal shook his head. “No. Just mine. I searched every student before isolating them into the classrooms. Nobody had a weapon.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “We have a killer on the loose and a… whatever the hell Dean is following our every move, and my weapon is gone?”
Leigh forced herself to breathe through the initial panic. All right. How much ammunition had she left in the magazine? Ten bullets? Less? Damn it. She couldn’t remember. The fact there were bullets in it at all was the problem. Not to mention she could be suspended for allowing civilians to get a hold of it in the first place.
She headed for the classroom at the far end of the corridor where the forensic techs had set up. “Do you suppose anything else might go wrong in this investigation? It might be nice to have a heads-up from now on.”
“Not sure I can help you there.” He tagged behind. “Though I can predict fugitives’ futures once I have them in custody, but they all end up in the same place so it’s not that difficult.”
Leigh had lost the inclination to laugh and swung into the classroom the forensic techs had taken over at the back of the building. Both techs looked up from the two elongated tables they’d lined with evidence bags. She recognized the syringe the killer had presumably used to kill Alice Dietz in one, the bottle of dish soap in another. The bleach bottle too. Then there were the six driver’s licenses spread out, each sealed in its own bag. “Have you been able to match any more licenses to the victims in this case?”
“Agent Brody, yes. We’ve made some progress. We managed to process the licenses with the alkali solution from the biomedical lab to stop the acid from eating the plastic, but there’s still a lot of damage. The acid ate through some sections, but we saved bits of information.” The closest tech to her rounded the table and grabbed a few of the smaller evidence bags. He handed them off individually, split between her and Ford. “The photos have been compromised. There’s nothing we can do to restore those, but we were able to match the names and a couple birth dates and addresses on the licenses to ones listed in the case files provided by Marshal Ford by filling the groves left behind by the machine press when the licenses were created. Kind of like running a pencil over a pad of paper to figure out the last message written.”
“Pierce Morrow’s license was also in the collection.” Leigh could barely make anything out on the licenses themselves, but she trusted the techs had done their jobs. She turned to Ford. “So we’re waiting on one more license. We must have missed a victim. Someone the unsub targeted and whose identity he stole before killing Alice Dietz.”
Ford handed her the two licenses. “There haven’t been any other identities the killer took on as far as I know.”
“Or the body hasn’t been recovered,” she said.
“I’m in the final stages of restoring the last license now. Give me… one minute. And, we have a result!” The second tech’s victory smile faltered. His gaze cut to Ford then Leigh. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”
Leigh cut toward the table. “Who is it?”
Bits of ink clung to the indented letters on the plastic.
Spelling out a single name.
One she knew.
Two gunshots exploded through the room.
Leigh grabbed for her service weapon on instinct and turned to face the threat. Empty handed.
Ford leveled the gun at her chest, and the blood drained from her upper body on a gutting exhale. “I really wish you wouldn’t have seen that.”
He slammed the butt of the weapon into her temple.
And the world went black.